


You Are My Sweetest Downfall (I Loved You First)

by PlayingTheGameOfThrones



Category: Aladdin (2019)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bonding Through Trauma, Domestic Violence, F/M, Friends to lovers to enemies to lovers again, Hurt and comfort, Parent Death, Parental Abuse, Prostitution mention, angst but with fluff too, brief gore at beginning, domestic abuse, everyone is a bit darker here particularly jasmine, w slur
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2020-05-16 22:18:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19327210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlayingTheGameOfThrones/pseuds/PlayingTheGameOfThrones
Summary: One day, walking with her mother, Princess Jasmine comes across a poor street rat, clutching a golden staff and a red parrot on his shoulder. But there is much more to this street rat than meets the eye.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please pay attention to the tags.

Jafar watches his mother die when he is eight.

He crouched in the corner of his family’s Shirabad shack, his hands over his ears, a fresh bruise throbbing over his left eye. In the other room, separated only by a ragged red curtain, he could hear his mother’s muffled screams.

“How many times have I told you to keep your mouth shut?” He heard his father growl, each word punctuated by his father’s fist connecting with another part of his mother’s flesh. Her whimpers stirred a rage deep inside Jafar’s chest, boiling hot. He had heard his father beat his mother – and had felt his father’s fists himself, as his blossoming bruise reminded him – a thousand times, but this time, Jafar sensed, was different.

He forced himself to his feet, staggering a bit until he steadied himself against the wall. He wiped blood from his broken nose with the back of his hand and, taking a deep, shaky breath, pulled aside the curtain.

His mother was lying prostrate on the dirt floor of their hut, her hands clasped in a silent plea. His father stood over her, a tall and cruel man with the blackest eyes Jafar had ever seen. He clutched his omnipresent cobra staff in his hand, his knuckles white and trembling with rage, looking as if he were strangling the inanimate golden snake. _If he would only part with his precious staff, we could be living in a real house and I would not have to scavenge and lie and steal to feed us._ Jafar could feel the familiar fury settling back in his chest, white-hot as the desert sand on the sand dunes of landlocked Shirabad. He felt his hands curl into fists and begin to shake. _But that staff is the only thing he has ever cared about. He has never loved me or my mother. Only the staff. And his power over us._

His mother caught Jafar’s eye, her warm brown eyes filled with tears and surrounded with black, as if she had smeared on too much kohl. But Jafar knew it wasn’t kohl, and the bruise on his eye matched hers. _No, please,_ she mouthed at Jafar, silently begging him to turn and run before her husband aimed his wrath on her son instead. But Jafar would not leave his mother, not this time, and his father was already turning away from his wife lying on the floor to face Jafar.

His father’s face twisted into a contorted grimace that passed as his smile, his mouth warped by a long white scar received in the war with Agrabah, fought before Jafar was born. Before his father could speak, though, Jafar’s mother interrupted, her voice hoarse from her screams.

“Iago, please.” Her voice was thick with unshed tears, every word sounding as if it pained her more than anything. “Hurt me. Not my son.”

 _Not_ my _son._ Jafar had long suspected his father was not actually his father. Or, rather, he had hoped. He knew his mother had had to do, as she put it, “unsavory things” to survive. Now, it seemed, she has confirmed that Iago was not Jafar’s father after all.

Iago rounded on his wife again, holding the wicked staff over his head. “So you admit it, you filthy whore,” he snarled. “The bastard has never been mine.”

With the last bout of her strength, Jafar’s mother pulled herself into a sitting position. “Even if you were his father, he has _never_ , for a moment, been your son.”

With a scream of rage from Iago, Jafar watched helplessly as his father plunged the end of his staff into his mother’s heart, watched the light leave her brown eyes until they were cold and empty, never to see anything ever again.

His father turned his back on his dead wife, yanking his staff from her body with a sickeningly wet sound. To Jafar’s surprise, the staff is immaculate, no blood anywhere, as if by magic. “And now for _your_ punishment, _bastard_.”

Jafar was never exactly certain what happened next. He remembered his hands reaching out, warm tears wet on his cheeks, a scream of rage tearing out of his throat as if from the deepest, darkest part of himself, and a flash of blinding red light filling the room. The next thing he knew, his father had disappeared, his staff clattering to the floor. Next to the staff, a small parrot with dark red feathers cowered before Jafar on the dirt, its curved beak nearly brushing the ground. 

When the guards found and arrested him for the murder of his parents, Jafar was rocking back and forth on the ground, his mother’s head cradled in his lap, sobbing her name.


	2. Chapter 2

Jasmine and Jafar meet for the first time when they are thirteen.

The crowd in front of the palace doors parted like the Red Sea. The guards pulled the golden doors open, and Queen Scheherazade and Princess Jasmine stepped onto the streets of Agrabah, just as they did every Sunday morning.

Shouts from the adoring crowd greeted the queen and Jasmine as they walked hand-in-hand toward the market. “My queen!” A woman shouted before stepping shyly in the path of Jasmine and her mother. The guards at their sides tensed, but the queen held up her hand, and the guards let the woman approach. She was holding a swaddled baby in her arms, the tiny face barely visible among the folds of brown cloth. “My son is very sick. Perhaps a blessing?” The woman asked in a soft voice.

Jasmine watched as her mother smiled and nodded, carefully removing her hand from her daughter’s as the woman handed the queen her baby. At this close proximity, Jasmine was surprised to see that it had only been the lines of worry etched into her face for her child that had made the woman seem much older. _She’s not a woman at all,_ Jasmine realized as she watched her mother whisper a prayer with the girl and gently press a kiss to the infant’s forehead. _The poor girl can be only a few years older than me._

“Allah bless you, my queen,” the girl called as they moved along down the street. “And you as well, my princess!”

Queen Scheherazade and Princess Jasmine continued on this way for some several hundred feet, greeted by the calls of their people and occasionally stopped by a desperate supplicant much like the girl and her baby. But when they reached the market and the crowd dispersed, they entered a whole new world where Jasmine and her mother could almost be anyone at all. This was Jasmine’s favorite part of their trips into the city: the vibrant market at the heart of Agrabah, where the streets were lined with stalls selling everything from delicious meats to luxurious foreign silks. Here, with her hood pulled over her hair, among her people, enjoying the brilliant colors and sights of the market, Jasmine felt like she could be anyone at all.

On these trips with her mother, Jasmine often liked to pretend that they were nothing more than two ordinary citizens of Agrabah, enjoying a lazy afternoon in the market, perhaps buying ingredients for the simple dinner they would make together later that evening, or rolls of fabric to make dresses. Jasmine wasn’t sure why she liked to pretend she was ordinary, nor did she ever admit to her mother that she harbored such thoughts on their trips together; she knew only that the loneliness of royalty already chafed at her at the age of thirteen, and she would rather be anyone – even a street rat – than herself. At least street rats had the freedom to run about their city and take in its sights, or even the freedom to venture beyond Agrabah. All Jasmine had the freedom to do was return home to her chambers after these weekly trips to the market, back behind the walls that were starting to make her home feel more like a prison than a palace.

As Jasmine made her way through the brightly colored stalls with their even more brightly dressed merchants hawking their wares, she began to hear what sounded like a pack of guards shouting, and beneath that, what sounded like a young man begging.

Curious, and pity stirring in her heart at the sound of the boy’s cries, Jasmine began to follow them, first down one darkened alley, then down another. Each house she passed – shacks and huts, really, more than houses – seemed to have someone begging for food or coins on the doorstep. Every face Jasmine saw was smeared with dirt or tears or both, and filthy hands reached out of filthy sleeves toward her in a plea for help. This was her first time seeing the poverty and despair that lined the underbelly of Agrabah’s facade of wealth and glamor, and she felt bile climbing her throat. _Why has my father done nothing about this?_

After what felt like an eternity, Jasmine finally arrived at the shack she had heard the cries emanating from. Unlike the other places she had passed along the way, this particular shack didn’t even have a door – just a ragged red curtain separated the inside of the shack from the dust and filth of the dark alley. Jasmine wondered briefly if this alley ever saw any sunlight, before taking a deep, shaky breath. She reminded herself that she was the princess, the daughter of the sultan, and she had nothing to fear. She gingerly pushed aside the curtain and stepped inside, holding her head high as befitted a woman of her status.

The scene that greeted Jasmine on the other side of the curtain, however, was not something she ever expected to see, and she could feel her resolve dissolving as quickly as it had come.

A group of what appeared to be soldiers or guards of some kind – though Jasmine had never seen anyone in Agrabah who wore their peculiar black uniforms that made them resemble the scorpions one sometimes encountered in the open desert – was standing in a semicircle; in the center of their slowly-approaching pine stood a young boy about Jasmine’s own age of thirteen.

But Jasmine could see right away that this was no ordinary boy. In his hand he clutched a strange golden and turquoise staff fashioned in the shape of a cobra, and on his shoulder perched a blood-red parrot with a cruelly hooked black beak. Though he wore the same rags everyone in his part of Agrabah seemed to wear and his dark curls were matted with dirt and sweat, Jasmine could feel a sort of powerful energy surrounding the boy, one she had never felt before, one that made the hair on her arms stand at attention and her skin turn to gooseflesh.

“Please stop,” the boy begged, holding out the staff defensively. The room began to fill with an eerie, golden-red glow, as if the sunset had arrived early. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.” His voice shook, and a strange wind passed through the shack, lifting Jasmine’s hood from her head and revealing the tiara nestled in her black hair. The emerald in the center of her tiara seemed to glow with a light of its own in the dark room, and the boy caught her eye for the first time.

Taking advantage of the boy’s distraction, one of the strange men lunged for him, and Jasmine found herself shouting, her voice filling the tiny room.

“I command you to stop in the name of Jasmine, Princess of Agrabah.”

The man who had lunged at the boy looked up as the rest of the men turned in unison to face the princess. The boy forgotten for the moment, the man advanced on her, speaking in an accent, similar to her mother’s own. But instead of the familiarity comforting her, it sent a shiver down Jasmine’s spine, as if someone had doused her with cold water. “Well, well, well,” he drawled, stalking closer and closer until she could feel his foul breath on her face. He reached out a long, bony finger and roughly tilted her chin up to meet his cruel eyes. “If it isn’t the little princess.”

“If you don’t let go of me, I will have you arrested on the orders of the Sultan,” Jasmine threatened, but she could hear her voice shaking.

The man laughed. “If the princess is in the city,” he said to his men, his eyes twinkling, “That means someone else is, too. _The queen_.”

_The queen? What do they want with my mother? Why do they speak as if they were from her country?_

But before Jasmine could ask any of her questions, she heard the boy begin to shout, “Let go of her!” A cold wind, stronger than the first, tore through the shack, the sunlight filtering through the curtain going completely dark. When the light returned and the cold wind was replaced by the heat of the Arabian afternoon, the soldiers were gone, leaving Jasmine, the boy, and his strangely-colored parrot alone.

In spite of herself, Jasmine slumped against the wall, sliding down to the dirt floor. The boy rushed over to her, setting down his shaft and placing his hand so gently against her cheek it could have been a warm breeze brushing across her face. “Princess,” he said softly as he took her hand in his own and brought her to her feet. “Are you alright?”

When Jasmine gathered her wits about her and looked up at the boy, she was greeted with the warmest brown eyes she had ever seen. “Call me Jasmine,” she replied, intensely aware of their clasped hands.

The boy smiled, revealing his crooked teeth, which only served to endear him to her further. “Call me Jafar.”

Jasmine found herself smiling back and squeezed his hand. “Nice to meet you, Jafar.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry if it seems like this chapter ends rather abruptly! There is a lot more to come with the soldiers and Jafar and Jasmine, and I wanted to end this chapter on a sweet note before continuing with the action next chapter.


	3. Chapter 3

Screams in the near distance shattered Jasmine and Jafar’s reverie.

Jafar jumped to his feet, his golden and turquoise staff suddenly in his hand, though Jasmine had not seen him reach for it, the parrot retaking its place on the boy’s shoulder. He had a frightened gleam in his dark eyes, but a grim determination about his demeanor, both of which told Jasmine he lived life constantly on edge, constantly running from something, though from what – aside from the strange soldiers she had seen – she could not guess.

“What is that?” Jasmine asked as the screams began again after a lull.

“I’m not sure,” Jafar said, shaking his head. “But knowing Agrabah, it’s nothing good.” He returned just attention to Jasmine. “You stay here. I’m going to see what’s going on out there. I’ll come back for you.” And he was gone, much in the same way he had taken up his staff; one moment he was standing before her, as tangible as anything else in the tent they stood in, and in the blink of an eye, he was no longer there.

Jasmine was stung by his comment about Agrabah, and confused at his sudden disappearance, but she had no intention of staying behind while he went off to discover all the danger. She knew the strange boy by his accent and his lighter skin that he must have grown up in Shirabad, the kingdom her mother had been from before she came to Agrabah at eighteen to marry Jasmine’s father. Queen Scheherazade’s younger brother, Jasmine’s uncle, still ruled Shirabad as its sultan. Jasmine wondered at how someone as young as Jafar seemed – for there was no mistaking him as being any more than a year older than herself – had managed to immigrate from Shirabad to Agrabah seemingly on his own, even if the two kingdoms shared a border. And she wondered what horrors he must have seen there to make him leave and to give him that look in his eyes. Jasmine knew from her mother that Shirabad was a tougher place to live than Agrabah; her own childhood had not been an easy one, even growing up in the palace as she had. Jasmine knew whatever Jafar had left behind there must have been terrible.

Jasmine set out after him, brushing aside the red fabric of the tent and stepping into the blinding afternoon sun, a droplet of sweat immediately dripping from her hairline down her neck. As she drew nearer to the screams, which had transformed from frightened wails to shouts of anger, Jasmine wondered where her mother was for the first time. Queen Scheherazade must have been looking for her daughter now that the city had descended into chaos. And even though the princess knew she should turn away from the danger and go searching for her mother, she could feel something pulling her inexorably in the direction of the boy. Like some sort of strange magic that bound her to him so that she could not help but follow his footsteps through the sand toward the commotion.

But when Jasmine rounded the corner and found the source of the screaming, it was nothing she could have imagined. Jafar stood beside the prostrate and seemingly bloodless corpse of the queen, tears streaming down his face. 

 

Jasmine sank to her knees, a sound escaping from her throat that was more animal than human. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for my long absence! During quarantine I have gotten back into this fandom now that the film is on Disney+, and I hope to continue updating this story. As you can tell by the new title and tags, I have decided to take this story in a different direction than originally planned, but I hope you still like it!

**Author's Note:**

> I know this chapter is really brutal but I promise it gets better/easier to read from here.


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